‘Obama’s war of choice in Afghanistan’

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Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations makes the case for fewer U.S. troops in Afghanistan:

It was a war of necessity after the attacks of 9/11 when you had a hostile government led by Taliban in Afghanistan. Now you have an essentially friendly government in Kabul and al-Qaida has re-established itself in Pakistan. So I am no longer sure what happens in Afghanistan is still essential to the war on terrorism. Afghanistan is thus a war of choice — Mr. Obama’s war of choice. There needs to be a limit to what the United States does in Afghanistan and how long it is prepared to do it.

via US Foreign Policy Expert Richard Haass on Afghanistan: ‘This Is No Longer a War of Necessity’ – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International.

I’m always happy to see the safe haven argument–that NATO requires a large presence in Afghanistan to prevent terrorists from turning it into a base–swatted away. As Mr. Haass points out, they can just as easily set up shop in another country. (Somalia and Pakistan come to mind.) In fact, you could make the case that Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was problematic less because it hosted a clutch of rudimentary training camps, where terrorists  fired rocket launchers and negotiated obstacle courses, and more because it offered Pakistan’s strategic establishment, the Taliban’s original sponsor, a way to keep its fingerprints off violence for which it was partly responsible. In that limited sense, the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu to Kabul was a dress rehearsal for 9/11.

Over the past several years, the likes of Steve Coll and Lawrence Wright have shown just how difficult it is to unravel the threads–a combination of personal ties, pan-Islamic fervor and old-fashioned geopolitics–that bound the Taliban, al Qaeda and Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). But for the public at large the notion that Afghans sheltered terrorists while Pakistanis helped catch them, which took hold in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, has been hard to shake.

Only in the past six months or so, with the mainstreaming of the term AfPak, has the twinned nature of Afghan and Pakistani extremism become widely apparent. In the long term, the violence emanating from the region will end only when Pakistan’s only effective institution, the army (which controls the ISI) gives up terrorism as a tactic and pan-Islamism as an animating principle. In the short term, the international community ought to focus on finding the elusive combination of carrots and sticks that will nudge Islamabad down the path of moderation. (More sticks, fewer carrots would be a good place to start.) Nothing suggests that sending more troops to Afghanistan–where they will remain vulnerable to attacks from safe havens in Pakistan–will bring us any closer to that outcome. If anything, it could have the opposite effect.